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Wyoming Senators Look to Deny EPA’s Wind River Ruling

ICTMN Staff

4/2/14

The Northern Arapaho Tribe on April 1 presented a press release in regards to the latest step by Wyoming legislators to stifle the Wind River Reservation boundaries.

According to the release, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) has drafted legislation, that is supported by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), that would eliminate the reservation status of a significant portion of Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone homeland in central Wyoming.

“It’s chilling to see this kind of attack on Indian country in 2014,” Darrell O’Neal, Northern Arapaho Business Council chairman, said in the release.

The drafted bill is a response to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to treat the Wind River tribes as a state under the Clean Air Act.

The EPA ruling gave the tribes “authority to monitor the air and submit opinions about permits to emit chemicals into the atmosphere on the Wind River Indian Reservation and within 50 miles of the reservation boundaries,” according to an ICTMN story in January.

Within those boundaries sits the town of Riverton, long thought to have been usurped from the reservation in a 1905 land act, but it was decided in December the act did no such thing.

“A detailed legal analysis in the EPA decision concluded that the town of Riverton is part of the Wind River Reservation, a position the tribes have always held,” the tribal release states.

Since then, the fight has escalated on both sides and as the Billings Gazette reported today, “each side claims the other is unqualified to determine a boundary.”

Enzi’s legislation declares the 171,000 acres that includes Riverton, has never been part of the reservation and will continue to remain that way according to the Gazette.

“Sen. Enzi doesn’t want to change the current boundaries,” Coy Knobel, communications director for Enzi said in the Gazette. “He wants to make sure they stay as they have been for decades.”

The news of the legislation broke following a trip by Northern Arapaho leaders to Washington, D.C. last week to confront the Wyoming delegation, where they expressed their opposition to the bill.